Film Maker Quotes & Sayings

It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word. — Steven Spielberg

I think I'm a maker of songs, and songs are like films or a picture: You put them over there, and they have nothing to do with you. — PJ Harvey

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can. — Mike Nichols

There is also an artistic element which is lead by the film maker. Issues of what is reality and objectivity are as always relevant as someone is going to edit the film. — Ben Edwards

To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different. — Danny Boyle

There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him. — Finn Jones

I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I? — David Toop

With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal. — Robert Gottlieb

My favourite film-maker west of the English Channel is not English - but to me doesn't seem American either - David Lynch - a curious American-European film-maker. He has - against odds - achieved what we want to achieve here. He takes great risks with a strong personal voice and adequate funds and space to exercise it. I thought Blue Velvet was a masterpiece. — Peter Greenaway

You don't necessarily have to go to film school to be a brilliant film maker. If you are a good listener and you study life, and you find that story that is buried within each and every one of us, and you figure out a way to bring that out. And sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean money or winning the lottery. — Tony Todd

It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work. — Jonas Mekas

Movies are very expensive endeavors, and my first film was not particularly a money-maker. Quite the opposite. — Roman Coppola

At one A.M. we are learning over a bar, Jim and I, and I am stressing the primary importance of the wish. Not knowing what we want, not wishing for it , keeps us navigating along peripheries and tributaries formed and shaped by external influences. I said: Forget about the probable and improbable. Just a few hours ago I met Shirley Clark. She had no money at all but wanted to go to India. She is a film maker. The wish was the orientation. When an offer came to make a film about French children for UNESCO, she accepted, and it led to her being asked to make film on an Indian dancer. Her wish, for years, was the beacon. The probable and improbable are only negative concepts we have to transcend, not accept. — Anais Nin

We are hopefully seeking some kind of distribution - but that's the ultimate goal of any independent film-maker. We are sold-out, from what I was told yesterday. We're going to try to put together another screening because I know there's a lot Jersey Boys fans that are coming. I don't know when, why or how, but we definitely want the opportunity for everyone to see this. — J. Robert Spencer

It's very, very important to me, no matter who the person is, to play that person with the utmost degree of truth that I'm able to bring. But playing a character like Jack Sparrow or Willy Wonka, that requires nothing but a degree of responsibility to the intent of the story - responsibility to the film-maker to deliver the goods. — Johnny Depp

There are so many people I know who could be the greatest film-maker but who will never get the chance to make a movie; it's all about what somebody is going to make back. There are not a lot of romantic ideas about making movies anymore. — Alexandra Cassavetes

I don't have many actors in my family, but I do have a Great Uncle that is a film-maker in Philadelphia, and my great-great-grandparents were Flamenco dancers in the 30's in New York, they were Spanish dancers. — Aubrey Plaza

Oscar may be the world's most glorious way of honoring your work, but the real award for a filmmaker is the contentment which you receive from making your film. — Abhijit Naskar

While mainstream media is led by profit, ratings and popularist culture and filtered by the current political climate, Alternative Media is lead solely by the convictions of the campaign and film maker. — Ben Edwards

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound. — Peter Greenaway

McQueen is an astonishing film maker. He uses really unusual shots and builds incredible dramatic tension. — Kevin Whately

There's nothing quite like the idea of failing spectacularly to excite a film maker — Mike Figgis

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture. — George Lucas

As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it's my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what's happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it. — Jonas Mekas

The audience is making the film and not the film-maker. — Woody Allen

Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own - language not the image is its material, its intimate effect on the isolated reader is not the same as that of a film on the crowd in a darkened cinema - but precisely for these reasons the differences in aesthetic structure make the search for equivalents an even more delicate matter, and thus they require all the more power of invention and imagination from the film-maker who is truly attempting a resemblance. One — Andre Bazin

My goal is to keep making films and grow as a film maker; that's always my goal. — Rob Zombie

Photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself. — Abigail Solomon-Godeau

I think I'm an actor. You can hire me. I can do a good job. But you also have to get lucky now and then. Every film-maker knows how hard it is to do a good film. You have to just make many, and see how lucky you get. — Rutger Hauer

I never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry. — Abbas Kiarostami

My experience I consider an accident in the Hollywood system. I don't believe it should be a reference for a black film maker, or an example for any young film maker, because it's purely luck. — Euzhan Palcy

The cinematic language and interior destiny of each Iranian film-maker is different. The international influences on them vary from Rossellini to Fellini, Akira Kurosawa to Hou Hsiao-hsien, but there is a strong sense of solidarity. — Tariq Ali

For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him. — Virginia Woolf

I always wanted to be a film-maker when I was younger, not an actor. I was an eight-year-old who dreamed of being a writer on 'The Simpsons,' which was a weird dream to have. But I started taking acting classes as a way to learn how to direct actors and I sort of fell in love with it. — Jonah Hill

People talk differently. You can say some things some places you can't say in other places. But me as a film maker, no words are ever going to be off limits in something I write. As long as people use the words, I'm going to report that. — Dax Shepard

I believe that independent film making is the last frontier of creative expression available. So I'm always willing to lend a helping hand to a young film maker who's just getting into the business. — Lloyd Kaufman

Without art, a film is pure wastage of time and resources. — Abhijit Naskar

One of the very, very exciting things I have found here in L.A. is that no one talks to you about being Scottish. Whereas, if you are in London and you are trying to put films together and be a film-maker, there is a kind of unspoken sense that, if you are Scottish, you have something to overcome or else you cannot really do that project. — Peter Capaldi

To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention ... Documentary approach to cinema differs from that of story-film not in its disregard for craftsman-ship, but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put. Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The pot-maker makes pots, and the documentarian documentaries. — Paul Rotha

Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today. — Andrew Sarris

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. — Pico Iyer

I have always thought that the role of the film-maker is to present the argument persuasively, emotionally and coherently and then it is over to the viewer, they are either convinced or not convinced, moved or not moved and they decide whether they will take action or not. — Franny Armstrong

Even for the most difficult scenes, and there are difficult scenes in the film, and because Michael Haneke is such a great film-maker - I think a great film-maker is not only being inspired, but how to do it, how to make it as real as possible, knowing that it's not real. — Isabelle Huppert

I think I'm generally - fear, fear is very still, so in terms of that kind of fear - there's so many different kinds of fear, but fear is something, particularly in movies, that's interesting, because it's created by the film maker, that was created by [David] Fincher, that's why he's brilliant. — Jake Gyllenhaal

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason. — Errol Morris

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot. — A.A. Gill

Art can mean a lot of things. At the heart of it, art is doing something you really believe in. Like my wife, she volunteers helping underprivileged kids, that's her art. To me, anything that you do that you truly believe in makes you an artist. It doesn't necessarily mean being a painter or a film maker. That's art, but there's more to it than that. As long as you're pouring your heart and soul into what you're doing, that's the weapon. — Ray Toro

I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer. — Beau Bridges

If I weren't a film maker, I'd probably be a handyman. — Marshall Brickman

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object. — Jean Renoir

At least I know that one film-maker in my career has had the initiative to come to me and thought of me as being capable of doing interesting and complicated work, and so I have a new-found belief that other film-makers will see me in a different way, the way that Patty did. — Charlize Theron

I think it's great to be talked about as a woman film-maker. It's part of who I am; it affects me daily. I want it to be part of the conversation. I'm for any scheme or initiative that gives women a way in. — Sarah Gavron

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image
its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism
has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist — Andre Bazin

From my experience as an actor, choreographer, action director, and producer, I understand the elements and the dynamics of being a film maker. — Donnie Yen

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker. — Storm Jameson

Here's what I like about God: Trees are crooked, mountains are lumpy, a lot of his creatures are funny-looking, and he made it all anyway. He didn't let the aardvark convince him he had no business designing creatures. He didn't make a puffer fish and get discouraged. No, the maker made things - and still does. European film directors often enjoy creative careers, during which their films mature from the manifestos of angry young men to the rueful wisdom of great works by creative masters. Is an afternoon siesta the secret? Is their vita just a little more dolce? We've taken espresso to our American hearts, but we haven't quite taken to the "break" in our coffee breaks. Worried about playing the fool, we forget how to simply play. We try to make our creativity linear and goal oriented. We want our "work" to lead somewhere. We forget that diversions do more than merely divert us. — Julia Cameron

Visual design is always a collaborative process between the director and the cinematographer. According to the best-case scenario, the director and cinematographer challenge each other as equals, and ultimately synthesize their differing approaches into a superior collective decision. But for this to be the case, the director must be as good a shot maker as the DP. If he is the weaker partner, then the look of the finished film will not be his — Gil Bettman

They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.' — Mira Nair

If I wasn't a film-maker, I'd be a film critic. It's the only thing I'd be qualified to do. — Quentin Tarantino

I worked with John Maybury on The Jacket and I think he's an extraordinary film-maker. I read the first drafts of this piece when I was working on The Jacket, and we'd so fallen in love with him that we thought he was the only person that should direct this! We wrote poems for him, we sent him champagne and cakes. Four years later he finally read it. — Keira Knightley

I am an independent film-maker first and foremost. I have always cut my own cloth. — Mira Nair

I suppose I like to think of myself as a film-maker. — Kathryn Bigelow

I am myself a professional creator of images, a film-maker. And then there are the images made by the artists I collect, and I have noticed that the images I create are not so very different from theirs. Such images seem to suggest how I feel about being here, on this planet. And maybe that is why it is so exciting to live with images created by other people, images that either conflict with one's own or demonstrate similarities to them. — Thomas Koerfer